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Resilient Horizons: Saving Britain’s Historic Coastal Towns from Climate Change, Dunwich, Suffolk, England

Part 2 Project 2023
Mehul Jethwa
De Montfort University | UK
This project aims to address climate change and flooding affecting England’s coastal communities in the near future. The proposal is based in Dunwich, an English town of significant cultural and history, having used to be the sixth largest medieval settlement in England. The project highlights the importance of preservation and identity, especially when it comes to Genius Loci: The English Town in theorizing a vision for resilience through retrofitting of existing structures that will meet their demise due to the proximity to the changing coastline.

Imaginative retrofit solutions are carefully planned in terms of material use and appropriate typological and programmatic considerations. The project combines these practical solutions with a future agenda fit for the town identity and community organization. Programmatically, it offers a vision for a circular economy powered by the reuse of materials and the use of reeds as building material, taking new advantages of the impending landscape changes of the coastline. The project hypothesizes the re-inhabitation and reuse of flooded structures to fruitfully propose the unification of an otherwise potentially fragmented marshland community.

This extremely relevant and thought-provoking project asks us to consider how architecture projects can reflect a sophisticated awareness of the larger site and environmental context in mind while paying keen attention to detail.

Mehul Jethwa

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2023
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